My troubles with my thinkpad

[colryn]

Let me first introduce myself. I have been lurking for some time. I am no stranger to thinkpads. I used T21, T22, T23 and T30's at my previous employer. I enjoyed them. Mostly I found that they are very configurable with dual booting with Linux.

I have been wanting a T series ever since....... Enter E-bay. I think I found a great machine that was new and in it's original unopend box. I got a 2372HVU T42P for a steal. Three years of warranty and all. I added more RAM and thing performed awesome. My only issue was the drive. It came with a 60g frive. I needed more space for my dual boot purposes. I purchased a 100g seagate 7200.1 drive from newegg.com . I thought it was a good deal. The 100g Hitachi was 6 dollars cheaper but only came with a 3 year warranty. The seagate had a 5 year warranty. 6 bucks for two more years warranty was a no brainer.

Now comes the problem. For the life of me, I cannot rebuild the seagate with the origional build. I created recorery cd's from the stock drive. It did not work. After successfully loading all of the seven CD's form the R&R disks. The drive would boot into R&R. No Windows was present. The CD's created two partitions of the exact same R&R stuff. So, I thought that the CD creation did not work. So, I call IBM and pay $45.00 for their R&R disks. I wait three days and they arrive. I wipe the drive clean with no partitions and set the bios partitioin space to "normal". I use the IBM CD's and end up with the same type of problem. no windows os, just two partitions of R&R.

What the heck am I doing wrong. I have done all of the searches on this site for HPA problems and did not realize this is a mess. I cannot understand why IBM has created such a nightmare. I like the idea. It is very handy to be able to have the ability to reset a drive to factory specs. I want that ablity on my new drive. Reading all of the other threads about this topic makes my head hurt. With many experiments with different components and different methods, there seems to be no one all mighty solution to this problem. I read the IBM HPA document on creating an exact image but you have to use a thrid party image software. Huh...........

So my next solution after reading this document was to buy a HDD adapter and use the included software to create the image. Sounds good to me. This is IBM software. So the adapter arrives and I install the new drive into this adapter. I load the software on hte old drive and execute. It states that this software needs to loaded on a floppy and run from there. I do not have a floppy drive. Another solution bites the dust.

I am at my wits end. I do not want to spend anymore money on this problem.


Sorry for the long intro and description of my problem but I just had to vent........

I'm out...

Michael........

[Kyocera]

Mike, that does sound weird, have you tried the seagate site support faq's? I have not tried the particular drive you have but have done factory restores on several others on my t42 with no problems, the process is fairly automated. You mention changing the predesktop are security settings, have you tried it at "secure", which is the default.

[GomJabbar]

You mention changing the predesktop are security settings, have you tried it at "secure", which is the default.

Actually Access IBM help says that "Normal" is the default, with the other two options being "Secure" and "Disabled".

[Kyocera]

Mine came from the factory set to secure and has been there ever since, so i'm assuming that is the correct setting.

[colryn]

Mike, that does sound weird, have you tried the seagate site support faq's?

I did check seagates website and no updates are available. I do not think it is the drive. Just ot make sure I loaded a fresh windows on the drive to make sure it works. Everything went fine. Windows works well. This is quite a fast drive. I even loaded FC4 on it. It works flawlessly. I just cannot build an exact image from the IBM disks. I guess I will call IBM this evening to see if they can recommend anything. I did order a usb floppy drive which is my last resort. I really want that hidden partition on the new drive.

[SeanM]

After you reload from the CDs, and boot into rnr on the hard drive. . .what happens if you recover to factory contents from there?

[colryn]

After you reload from the CDs, and boot into rnr on the hard drive. . .what happens if you recover to factory contents from there?

It goes through the reload process again, asking me to reload all of the disks. I then once again have two partitions that are the same.

[Kyocera]

colryn:

I am happy to say that I have sucessfully transfered an image to the new HDD. I am not quite happy about the extra cost involved. Here is what I did.

I purchased a IBM USB floppy drive and the IBM ultrabay slim drive adapter for my machine. The adapter came with software loaded on a floppy to transfer the image. I think it is called ez-gig. You boot from the floppy and the software shows the two drives. It asks if you want to transfer. Say yes and away it goes. It does a while to complete the transfer but it works flawlessly. I inserted the new drive into the T42. The hidden partition was there as well as the Windows OS. Everything booted just fine. I rebooted the machine to make sure that I could go into R&R. It did great.

A very painless process. But I was not thrilled about having to buy more hardware to get it to work. I would have thought the factory CD's would have done the trick. Oh well, it does not matter now. My machine is up and running just fine.

I also repartitined the drive to my liking and loaded Linux Fedora Core 5 on it. The dual booting works perfectly. I have a happy computer and a happy owner. All in all, I still love IBM and their machines.

Moved it here for you.